Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/494

490 conception of what all of these educational institutions are striving for. Unless we agreed about that we could not possibly agree as to their efficiency. Fortunately, there is general agreement to-day that the aim of all educational institutions is a social one. The University of Kansas, and Boston Tech and Columbia University and all the rest are striving to this great end—to train men to serve the state intelligently, honestly and effectively. We are all attempting that. To what extent do we succeed relatively to one another?

Now, the natural process, I say, would be to examine the product of these different institutions and see whether men coming from these different institutions have "made good." This, however, is no easy matter where there are thousands of men to be considered and the gauging of the social efficiency of a single man is so difficult and delicate an operation. And then, you have to remember that the "making good" by an individual may have really little to do with the educational institution in which he has been trained. I had the honor of being brought up in the English university of Cambridge, which has been spoken of by a poet as a "nest of singing birds," for the reason that that university has produced, if I may use the term, an extraordinarily large number of great poets. But no one seriously suggests that the poetic power of Tennyson or Wordsworth had much to do with his training in the University of Cambridge. And so it is with the actual making good of a great many of our leading men; in most cases it is only indirectly due to the training they received in the university. Then you must bear in mind that an extremely important factor in the making of good flour is to have good grain, and that one institution might be as efficient as another, but yet for the lack of good grain not turn out so fine a product. Thus you would have to gauge not only the graduate, but the men at entrance, and this would greatly complicate the problem. Practically, then, I think, you would have to proceed indirectly by carefully examining the means that were employed in the institution to produce the results. If you bore in mind the idea of social service as a thing toward which we are all striving, you would have to begin, I suppose, with some estimate of the relative social value of a college education and the education in a professional school, taking each at its best. The aim of a college is to train a man broadly and so develop every side of his charctercharacter [sic] that he can devote himself to the duties of citizenship in whatever special sphere of activity he can be most effective. The professional school does not neglect breadth of outlook or the duties of citizenship, but it bends its powers to the education of men for the service of society through the medium of definite professions. To gauge the relative value of these two schools you would need to decide whether it was more important to have an alert broad-minded man with no professional skill, or a man who could